Dec 4, 2009

37.5% of the US population was involved in agriculture in 1900 and today less than half of one percent are in that business. We still have all the food we need, as well as supply other parts of the world.

There are 2.2 million farms and 50.4% of farms are less than 99 acres in size, with the average age of a farmer at 57.1 years old.

We export $115.5 billion of farm products a year. The top five farming counties in the US are in California. All data taken from the census.

With this handy program you can have an excuse to get off the phone every time and no one needs to know about it. Just set it to anyone in your contacts list, select a delay time (up to two hours) and press the sleep button on the top of your phone. Escape Call Free for iPhone will sit silently until the timer has run out, at which point you will get an urgent call and you can decide if it is time to leave.

A chipotle (chi-POET-lee) is a smoked, dried jalapeño chili used primarily in Mexican, Mexican-American, Tex-Mex, and Mexican-inspired cuisine. The deep red jalapenos are smoked for days until completely dry. It takes about 10 pounds of jalapenos to make a pound of chipotle.

Until recently, chipotles were almost exclusively found in the markets of central and southern Mexico. As Mexican food became more popular, it expanded into Northern Mexico and eventually the United States and other places, such as China.

Most chipotle chiles are produced in the Northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. This variety of chipotle is known as a morita (Spanish for blackberry or black raspberry; literally "little purple one"). This is a description of how the chipotle looks.

Couldn't resist this one. The Post Office has another official web site http://www.usps.com/green/ Seems like an oxymoron to have a 'green' website for a business that deals in delivering paper. Here is a clip from the site -

"did you know…We're building new postal facilities with the environment in mind. We use recycled fiberglass, natural lighting, thermal windows and solar electric and thermal systems. And water tanks to harvest rainwater."

I first thought this was a hoax, but it is from a reputable scientific organization, and I verified it with other publications. Australian scientists are looking for ways to reduce harmful methane emissions from the country's woolly flocks, a researcher said Nov 29, 2009.

Twelve percent of Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions originate with agriculture, and some 70 percent of that amount is blamed on livestock, with most of it coming from burps, study leader John Goopy said. (Yes, that is his real name)

With sheep, almost all of the methane produced comes out of their mouths. "There's not very much passed out the animal's anus at all," said Goopy, from the New South Wales Department of Industry and Investment.

Scientists measure the sheep's methane emissions by herding them into a specially designed booth shortly after they eat and then calculating the amount of gas belched. They hope to find whether there is a genetic link between the sheep that produce the least methane, which could then be exploited to breed low-emissions sheep.

Sheep produce about seven kilograms (15 lb) of methane a year while other cattle produce ten times that amount. Cows, sheep, goats, camels, buffaloes, and termites release methane.

"Of the 200 sheep so far tested, about half produced much more than average while the other half belched considerably less methane." (Hmmm, real science here)

Methane has about 17 to 21 times the environmental warming capacity of carbon dioxide. However, methane lasts only 12 years in the atmosphere vs. CO2, which lasts 100 years in the atmosphere. Wikipedia says the main greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone.

Let's sum this up - most of 70% of 12% comes from all livestock, of which sheep are some part of, and half of them produce more burps than the other half, so let's change nature and breed out the burping half. - We will deal with farting cows later.

And these people actually get paid by the government for these kinds of goopy studies. Of course, half get paid more and half get paid less than average.